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In case you missed it, the 2008 Oscars were on last night. The show lasted 3.37 hours, “No Country for Old Men” won Best Picture, Marion Cotillard (the lady with the nice smile) won Best Actress and Jon Stewart hosted.

In case you’re looking for a bit more info, Mahalo has the 60 second summary…

The Oscars in 60 seconds – Mahalo Daily

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So some people with a couple of iPhones got together & formed iBand. They’re using iAno, PocketGuitar, iPhoneSynth and BeatPhone apps for the iPhone, plus Nintendo DS Electroplankton. cool

YouTube has their 1st jam session.

iBand – home page

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If you were to pack your bags tonight, and move to either of Okinawa in Japan, or Ovodda in Sardinia, or even the town of Loma Linda in California, you might well live to a significantly older age as compared to remaining where you are now.

A report in the BBC states that some Loma Lindans live 5-10 years longer than their neighbors, in Ovodda centenarians are relatively common and in Okinawa, centenarians are even more common than in Ovodda.

Explanations vary from diet in Okinawa, to interbreeding in Ovodda, to both religion & diet in the case of Loma Linda.

Some may well point to the Okinawa Centenarian Study and conclude that longevity is associated with genetics and calorie restriction, while others read the Okinawa diet as advocating greater consumption of yellow/green vegetables esp. yamaimo.

…however, a per se study by analysts here at G-M shows that the strongest correlation with a long life is with place names that begin with the letter “O” and a weaker one with the letter appearing as the 2nd letter in the place name. We conclude our study by suggesting that longevity ought to be positively correlated with living in Oô, France.

The towns where people live the longest – BBC, 19 February 2008

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Some Silicon valley leading lights are down substantially year-to date. The AAPL of many investor’s eye, for example, is down almost 40% from Jan 2 2008, as at Feb 22.

Apple significantly underperformed the S&P 500 (-7.85%), NASDAQ:NDAQ (-18.37%), and ATT (+3.89%) as well as the other big tech names shown on the chart.

Can We Get a Do-over? – Valleywag, Feb 22 2008

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The Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad went out to their local Apple Store in Ginza, Japan, and purchased an Apple MacBook Air notebook, with the intention of seeing how it works.

True to their name, the NETS did indeed disembowel the MacBook Air, and were kind enough to share their findings and observations.

In brief, they weren’t impressed. While the MBA has a “perfect, sophisticated external appearance”, the inside was deemed to be under-engineered, immature, wasteful and bordering on crude …ouch.

The NETS team haughtily dismisses the kludgey internal design of the MacBook Air with the epithet: ‘the antithesis of Japanese manufacturing techniques’. Having thus violated several virtues of the techno-version of the Bushido code, the product is thus summarily dispatched via a single thrust to the core as delivered by a virtual Type 94 Katana.

MacBook Air Teardown – Nikkei Electronics, Feb 15, 2008

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Technology journalist Walt Mossberg reviews the soon-to-be-available Lenovo ThinkPad X300 notebook computer. In sum, Walt likes the thin (0.73-0.92 inch) ThinkPad calling it impressive, solid and innovative and perfect for many mobile PC users.

WM dings the X300 for its small (64GB) solid-state-drive, relatively low battery life and the big price ($2476-$3000). But he does go on to say that the laptop has some good features such as the 1440×900 128dpi screen and some things that are missing from the Apple MacBook Air namely an Ethernet jack, removable battery and a built-in optical drive.

…in summary, while the X300 is about 79% thicker than the MacBook Air, it has more of the features used by road warriors, and includes 26% more pixels.

Price May Be Steep, but Thin ThinkPad Has Abundant Features – Walt Mossberg, February 21 2008

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A new survey by In-Stat shows that users of mobile business gadgets are not in as big a hurry to move to converged devices as previously thought.

The $3495 report from In-Stat entitled “Converged Devices: US Road Warriors Start Cord Cutting” shows that only about 8% of business travellers have given up their land lines and gone completely mobile. Issues that impede wider adoption of converged devices include such things as battery life and usability/ergonomics.

Users also appear reluctant to put all their eggs in one basket and prefer to carry redundant devices.

In-Stat Survey Finds Current Converged Mobile Devices Fail to Compel Users – Business Wire, Feb 20 2008

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Red Ferret compares the original Apple iPhone to 5 clones from China, and finds that one of them isn’t all that bad.

All 5 comparables were made in China (as is the iPhone itself), are listed below and were assigned ‘credibility scores’ re how close they came to matching the real iPhone:

Desay A8+ …score: 3/10
CECT P168+ …score: 2/10
Desay M888 …score: 4/10
A380i …score: 3/10
i32/HiPhone …score: 6/10

Red F. was surprised by the progress made by the clones and even said that the HiPhone’s score would have been higher if the camera had been better.

The iClone Shootout – five iPhone phonies – The Red Ferret, February 20 2008

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Provided you`re willing & able to lift a 50 pound (22.6796185 kilograms) weight a height of 4 feet (1.2192 meters) every 4 hours (4 hours), you too can have about 40 watts of light for up to 200 years.

Clay Moulton a student at Virginia Tech won 2nd prize at the recent Greener Gadgets competition for his proposed design of the Gravia floorlamp described above and illustrated at right.

Lamp lit by gravity wins Greener Gadget award – Virginia Tech News, Feb 19 2008 via Core77

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Design student Toby McInnes at the University of New South Wales has designed a clever emergency survival kit, to be called the Bedu emergency rapid response, aka Bedu ERRP. Bedu is packaged in an oil-drum sized container to be air-dropped to disaster sites and is fitted out to support 8 people for up to 5 years.

Bedu contains among other things, a tent, hand generator, filtration system, medical kit, multifuel stove and an emergency radio kit. Nicely done.

Bedu- Emergency Rapid Response Product – Australian Design Award, Feb 20 2008 via Yanko Design

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